In the October 2004 issue, I reviewed an IBM machine not dissimilar
to this one. The IBM I reviewed had some very real
problems and I noted them in the review, but had I
received this machine first, I can only imagine how much
harsher I would have been to the IBM. In a way, I'm
glad I was able to review the IBM first, as it wasn't all
that bad a machine.
But, when considering the purchase of a high-end
workstation, you need to comparison shop among large
vendors, such as IBM and HP, and smaller vendors, such
as this system's builder, Monarch.

The Monarch machine arrived at my house packed
snugly in a huge, imposing box that had been
nestled carefully into a larger box packed with more
Styrofoam. The machine, constructed within a black
Lian Li case, could be described only as beautiful. If
I had any machines that were stuffed into typical beige
boxes, the beauty of this case would make me want to
take them outside and smash them with a hammer.

But for me, the external beauty of a machine is not
even on my list of top ten features of a machine. A
computer is meant to be used, and the case is often
meant to exist, gathering dust, under my
desk, where it's accessed rarely to pop a CD in the drive or
to power off.

As is my habit, the first thing I did when it arrived, having removed it
from its cardboard, plastic and Styrofoam womb, was to pop open the case.
This is something the Lian Li engineers really get. One screw and the
interior of the machine is wide open for your inspection—and what an
interior! Although other vendors have caught on to the importance of routing
cables properly, Monarch really does a nice job of this, and it's always
nice to see it.

The inside of this machine was as beautiful as the
outside, and the hardware selected for this machine
was top-notch. For storage, four 74GB SATA drives were situated neatly in a drive bay
along the bottom of the case, with two optical drives and
a 7-in-1 floppy/memory bay in the user-accessible
bays in the front. The case allows for an additional
two drives in the lower drive bay (for a total of six)
and an additional three or four (depending on the model or
the determination of the installer) devices or hard
drives in the user-accessible bays along the front
of the case. As you can see,
this machine has ample room for expansion from a storage perspective. The
SATA cables are tied off to prevent tangling.

To support all those drives, the machine comes with a 3ware card as well
as the motherboard-provided IDE controllers. The Opterons are each cooled
with a ThermalTake CPU cooler, and there are two banks of four memory slots
each. Topping all of this off, the machine ships with the top-notch NVIDIA
Quadro 3000 video card.

Remembering my last review, I think I compared the
IBM A Pro to a jet taking off, so if the Monarch was
anything but a dull roar, I would have been
happy about it. So, I plugged it in and turned it
on to find out.

At first, I wasn't sure I had turned it on. I killed
my music and then I heard it. It was slightly louder
than the small Shuttle-based workstation that I
keep tucked under my desk. I communicated this to
my editors and they shipped me the sound pressure
level (SPL) meter that LJ keeps around for such
things. My Intel 2.4GHz desktop measured around
39 decibels, and this monstrously powerful machine
came in at slightly more than this, 41 decibels.
During some of the more powerful apps I threw at it,
it reached 44 decibels.
To make a comparison,
when I was speaking with my three-year-old, she and I came
in at around 48 decibels.
But, enough about the mechanical and the construction—how does it run?